


Loss

by LavenderMandarin



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/F, I wouldn't really say it's heavy angst tho, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kara Danvers Needs Therapy, Kara Danvers Needs a Hug, Kara's just really tired, Lena Luthor Knows Kara Danvers Is Supergirl, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:09:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25173655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LavenderMandarin/pseuds/LavenderMandarin
Summary: A character study (of sorts) on Kara and her relationship with loss.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 39
Kudos: 119





	Loss

**Author's Note:**

> You have been warned, there is no happy ending

All Kara has ever known is loss.

She experiences loss for the first time when she’s just thirteen years old. She presses her hand to the cold glass of the pod and watches her parents’ faces get smaller and smaller. She sees her life, her family, her planet, blow up before her eyes and before she knows it, she’s spinning through the atmosphere and suddenly everything is dark.

She learns that the only way she’ll gain some reprieve from the darkness that surrounds her is to fall into the unconscious world and let it take her away from the darkness she knows as the real world for a while.

She doesn’t quite understand everything yet but as she floats through empty space, wondering where Kal-El is, she deduces that they were probably sent away to keep the bloodline going and so that Krypton can live on within them. 

At the age of thirteen, she begins to understand the weight of the burden she carries.

When she finally reaches Earth, having been stuck in the Phantom Zone for 24 years, the adult man who pulls her out of her pod is unfamiliar to her. Kal-El is no longer a baby but he still doesn’t quite have a grasp on either language. His Kryptonese is stiff and accented while his Earthian language—which he tells her is called English—is broken and unfamiliar.

He sends her away and brings her to another family and she can only watch from the doorway of her new home as he disappears from her life once again.

Her new family is kind, but their child, a human who goes by the title Alex, is harsh and cold towards her. Eventually, when they finally manage to work past everything, Alex becomes her home.

For the first time in her life, she feels like she’s been given something back.

Years later, after they’ve moved to National City, she almost loses Alex. She looks through buildings and the sides of the plane to see Alex trapped inside the failing vehicle and the only thing she can think about is how she can’t lose Alex.

Once she’s saved everyone on the plane, she finally feels a sense of relief and understands what she was sent here to do. She was sent to Earth to protect people.

She realizes being a superhero is not fun. Although she saves people, there are times where she gets there too late, times where she can’t do anything and the weight of the lost lives sits on her shoulders, making her curl into herself every time she loses another.

She gets good at pretending. Supergirl is supposed to be strong, kind, and invincible. Kara Danvers is supposed to be goofy, happy, and carefree. Between managing the two sides of herself, she neglects her true self. Kara Zor-El is simply too weak for her to be. She is a lost girl, her memories still trapped on a dead planet, the weight of the world sitting on her shoulders. She can’t afford to be her.

In order to convince everyone else, she crafts masks, facades that even Alex can’t see through. When she’s Kara, she’s carefree and kind, taking care of everyone else’s needs before she can even look at her own. When she’s Supergirl, she’s out, saving lives. Neither of these personas can afford her some reprieve, some time where she can just be herself.

Every morning when she wakes up, she plasters on her trademark smile, staring at herself in the mirror, unable to recognize the person staring back at her. She checks to make sure there are no cracks, nothing that will show that she is actually dying inside.

The person in the mirror is too happy, too light, and sometimes even she is fooled by the fake smile. But she can never show her weakness, there is no time, so she simply embraces this fake persona, hoping that perhaps she can be this happy too (while knowing she never can).

When she meets Lena for the first time, she is stunned. She finds it in herself to hope that perhaps she can learn to love, to temper the waves of loss that take over her every now and then and love someone.

She finds herself drowning in the blue and green of Lena’s eyes. The royal blue and forest green she sees in them makes her want to drown, to have Lena’s eyes be the last things she sees. 

She feels hope again and her heart flutters. Her smiles become less fake and she laughs more genuinely. Perhaps Lena will be the one.

When she watches the infinite earths wiped away on a monitor, she wants to go back, to save everybody, to save Alex, to save  _ Lena. _ Instead, she sits on the Waverider and pretends to be okay with the fact that her planet is gone. Again.

She watches the entire universe wipe away in an enormous red wave and before she knows it, she’s in the Point of No Return. 

Eventually, with nothing left to do, she finds herself perched on the windowsill of one of the only windows in the beaten up place they’ve found themselves in.

She gazes out at the dark emptiness and all it reminds her of is the Phantom Zone. She feels empty again, but she knows she has to be hopeful, otherwise, they will never make it out.

When they defeat the Anti-Monitor, she doesn’t have it in her to be happy about it. All she feels is tired. She’s oh so tired and all she wants to do is fall into an eternal sleep, to finally be at rest.

She returns to her duties as Supergirl and knows she will never be granted true rest. Not for a long long time. It’s all she can do to not feel resigned and curl up and disappear. 

Instead, she ventures out again, a fake smile plastered on her face once again, and waits for when the world will inevitably crumble.

She loses her home one day. Suddenly everything is slipping from her grasp and there is nothing on this planet that she can do to stop it. She can breathe ice, she can sear through metal with her eyes, she can lift whole buildings and toss them into space but there is nothing she can do about this.

Alex forgets and her world shatters around her.

She knows that it’s to keep Alex safe, to keep everyone at the DEO safe, but she can’t help but feel devastated when she looks into Alex’s eyes and all she sees is revulsion and a seriousness she has never seen in Alex before.

Alex—no, Director Danvers, doesn’t care about Supergirl. She doesn’t remember that Supergirl is actually her sister and Kara’s heart breaks. It breaks because she knows that nothing is controlling Alex, this is still Alex. Alex just doesn’t remember who she is, and she is devastated by that. The fact that Alex would care so little about her when she’s Kara and even less when she’s Supergirl makes her want to rip the planet in half.

She fights herself—no, a version of herself that she never knew existed. Red Daughter is persistent and it’s all she can do to not lose herself as she is threatened by the government, fights herself, and works around the fact that her only home is gone.

When Alex remembers again, she doesn’t feel relieved at all. She pretends to be relieved for Alex’s sake before she passes out again, sinking into the sweet embrace of unconsciousness, hoping to be granted at least a temporary reprieve from the despair around her.

When she tells Lena, she doesn’t expect it to go over so well and is overjoyed. She spends most of her days trying to prove herself to Lena, doing anything she asks of her.

She doesn’t question anything and simply follows Lena’s lead.

When Lena finally reveals how she’s been using Kara, all she can feel is devastation. She has had everything ripped away from her again. As Lena leaves the fortress, she spends some time contemplating just how much she has lost already and wonder how much more she must lose.

She supposes it’s her fate, her destiny to lose everything good that happens to her. She muses over her extended lifetime, thinks about the number of funerals she’ll have to attend. She wonders who will go first. Will it be her parents? Or will it be someone from the DEO, killed while trying to protect her? Or maybe it will be Lena? She feels like laughing and crying over the absurdity of it all. She’s locked inside a block of ice, slowly becoming weaker and weaker as the kryptonite poisoning takes effect, and the only thing that’s on her mind is which one of her friends and family will die first.

In hindsight, all she can see is a blind fool, bent to the whims of the one she loved, unseeing to the suspiciousness of it all. She can practically see herself drooling over Lena.

She realizes how Lena has used her every step of the way. Even then, the first thing she does is to try and get Lena back, ever naive and hopeful. 

When Lena aims kryptonite cannons at her, she realizes she can do nothing more and any attempts at apology are interrupted.

The only thing she feels is fatigue. She’s so tired of everything and she just wants to rest. She wants to be at peace. 

They’ve lost everything. The DEO, Lena, Brainy, everything, and everyone. She’s glad she can still lean back on a few of her friends for support but she’s so tired. She doesn’t want to fight anymore. 

J’onn finally allows her some reprieve, telling her to go home. The second she steps into her apartment, she breaks apart. She doesn’t even bother to turn on the lights, simply shedding her suit, grabbing some pajamas, and curling up on the couch with a pint of ice cream. She spends the rest of the night curled in the fetal position on a small corner of the couch, her eyes red from crying and her darkened apartment feeling colder than ever. 

The next night, instead of eating her feelings, she flies. She flies up into the stratosphere and hovers, gazing at the universes beyond this planet but unable to reach any of them. 

When she finally comes back down to her apartment, she finally understands. 

As she settles on the ledge of her balcony, she looks back up at the empty, black sky and sighs.

She feels hollow and knows there’s no way for her to ever pretend again. She understands that she was sent to Earth to help people, but she never truly understood what the consequences of that would be. 

She understands now. By giving up herself to help others, all she is destined for is loss. She laughs but the sound doesn’t sound happy to her. It sounds bitter and loaded with self-loathing. Only now does she truly understand. 

She feels the red cape stirring in the wind and lifts up again, this time finding herself perched on the ledge of L-Corp’s roof. 

It’s fitting, she thinks, that she’s back at L-Corp again. She almost considers letting herself fall to the ground from this height but reigns it in at the last second.

It’s all she can do to not feel like she has well and truly drowned in Lena as she stares back up at the empty night sky. She can see the stars beginning to shine through the cloudy night sky, but she only feels emptiness deep inside.

She considers what she was taught back on Krypton, the explosions that birth stars, and she can only hope that perhaps if she finally allows herself to boil over and explode, perhaps she can find the brightness in the emptiness she feels.

She leans back on her elbows and closes her eyes, running all her losses over again. There are so many, so so many that she hadn’t even thought of and as she tries to count them all, she finally feels at peace with herself.

She truly understands what she was meant for, what she was destined for, and for once, she can breathe easy. Kara Zor-El was only destined for one thing in life. She would never get to love, never get to feel the comfort of home again, never get to understand any sort of happiness because all she was destined for was loss.

As the moon shines through the clouds, she lifts up again, hovering slightly, just over the busy street below, and allows herself to bask in the coldness of the night sky. She tunes in on Alex’s heartbeat, steady with sleep, and then Lena’s heartbeat, still awake and in her office. It dawns on her that Lena will be able to see her in her last moments and she almost smiles again.

She trembles slightly in the air before the conflict in her warring mind is quieted. She has won. She waits until Lena is turned towards her balcony window, sipping a glass of scotch before she allows herself to finally relax.

She falls in slow-motion and sees Lena rush out to her balcony. Her shouts are carried away by the wind, muffled by the air moving around Kara as she speeds up. She lets herself smile one last time. She knows Lena can see it and finally allows herself to be content, to be at rest.

She lifts her hand in farewell before she finally allows her eyes to shut. Her smile becomes a little wider and she looks forward to the peace awaiting her.

If all she is destined for is loss, then she supposes there isn’t much to fight for anymore.

She finds it ironic that it wasn’t anyone else, it was her who died first and a laugh bubbles up in her throat. She spent all that time worrying for naught.

In her last few moments, a few feet from hitting the concrete, she whispers a few last words.

_ “Goodbye, Lena my love, Alex my home. I’ll await you on the other side, but don’t hurry, for you still have a lifetime left.” _

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry but not really because this was probably the best idea I've had in a long time
> 
> also i'm on tumblr @catargott


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